Astronomers Ask NASA to Build New Space Telescope to find Earth 2.0 in Decadal Survey Report

It’s kind of a excessive vacation for astronomers all over the world. Each 10 years, the Nationwide Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Drugs releases one thing known as the Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics. It lays out the most important priorities that astronomers should deal with for the next decade. The newest report, released Thursday and coming in at over 500 pages, makes loads of suggestions, however there’s one that stands out past the others: Discover one other planet that would host life.

How ought to we accomplish that? The report says NASA ought to construct and launch an $11 billion house telescope with a 20-foot-long dish that may picture distant planets exterior the photo voltaic system, in infrared, optical gentle, and ultraviolet. This telescope would have the ability to spot objects 10 billion instances dimmer than the celebs they’re orbiting. It may work out whether or not there’s an environment on these planets to maintain any potential life heat and comfortable.

It’d even have the ability to decide whether or not life truly exists on these liveable worlds, by recognizing indicators of organic exercise like methane concentrations.

This telescope could be one thing of a middle-ground compromise between two proposed ideas for brand new house telescopes: one known as LUVOIR, which might be 50 toes lengthy and doubtless value $17 billion; and HabEx, which might be simply 13 toes lengthy and doubtless underneath $10 billion.

The report doesn’t advocate in opposition to both idea, however the message between the strains is that NASA ought to mix the 2 to have a greater probability at discovering Earth 2.0, with out getting caught constructing one thing unattainable. The telescope would ideally be able to launch by the 2040s.

The brand new house telescope could possibly be simply certainly one of a slew of next-generation devices sitting in orbit and finding out the universe—at a time when astronomy is under threat by satellite mega-constellations like SpaceX’s Starlink. The report recommends beginning what it calls the “Nice Observatories Mission and Expertise Maturation Program,” as a pipeline for larger funding and planning in space-based applied sciences.

Whether or not Congress will pony up the funding for a program like that is a completely totally different query.